Pages

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Over the past few weeks, I've been taking an online course on Data Science with the R programing language. It's my first time taking an online course and it's been quite fun. I wanted to learn more about data science in general and this course came recommended by a friend. I didn't know anything about R at the start, but I have many years of experience working with Python, IDL, IRAF, etc, so it was easy to pick up. One of the best ways I learn, however, is through practice. So I figured I would create my own personal project: some data analysis on my blog.

This blog post will focus on the statistics I gleaned from accessing the API for Blogger, which is a product of Google. If you are interested in more technical details, I'll point you to my Github repo where I share the code I used to get the results I present below. Rather than focus on visitors or visibility, I instead focus on production. That is, how often do I post? What is the typical length of my posts? What words do I tend to use? And so forth.

This is a relatively long post with some graphs and lots of discussion. Read on if you're interested in how this blog has evolved through time or if you want to learn how to do it yourself.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Eight Skilled Gentleman is the third installment of Barry Hughart's Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox. It follows from the prior books, but an indeterminate amount of time has passed. As before, the novel takes elements of Chinese history and myth and blends them together with a lot of fantasy and a detective-style story.